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Leading European Energy Supplier Powers Its Business With Nexenta Software-Defined Storage [Global Data Point]

[August 04, 2014]

Leading European Energy Supplier Powers Its Business With Nexenta Software-Defined Storage [Global Data Point]

(Global Data Point Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Founded in 1896, SWT is responsible for providing electricity, gas, and water utilities to over 34,200 residents across 980 square miles in the South West area of Germany. Along with its responsibility for the power grid, SWT also supplies natural gas to private and business customers while managing two-thirds of Tuttlingen's drinking water and urban drainage.

SWT was running multiple high performance databases (Oracle, MSSQL) but the existing storage solution was hampered by relatively bad optimisation. The system was only four years old but also incapable of supporting a planned VDI deployment.

After testing and evaluating a system that was recommended by Nexenta's German premium partner Sievers Group, SWT opted for a 60TB NexentaStor license to underpin the entire SWT infrastructure at its headquarter's data centre.

Meik Müller, IT Manager at SWT, commented: "To keep our IT-system flexible enough to react with a rapidly evolving energy market, we were looking for a new storage system that offered high performance, flexibility and high availability. We already had experience with software-defined storage but it was when we met Nexenta that we knew we had the right solution."
Using NexentaStor, SWT has significantly increased the performance of its storage environments while keeping its costs low. One of the key selling points for SWT was the simplicity of Nexenta: There was no need for complex licensing. NexentaStor features, such as unlimited snapshots, thin provisioning and hybrid storage pooling, helped SWT to implement cost-effective storage with high performance.